It is almost a year ago that my
mother died. In the last weeks I have been thinking about her lifelong love of reading.
She always considered herself the informed consumer, the appreciative reader,
never the artist. She read (at least) one book a day all her adult life. She
dipped in and out of her books the whole day through.
Early morning breakfast, she read
her newspapers. She then did some chores or went off into town to do some shopping.
Late morning coffee, book at hand. More reading after lunch. Late afternoon she’d
meet with friends or make some telephone calls. Before dinner, she read The
Atlantic, New Yorker, or the weekend section of The Guardian. Dinner. Early to bed
with her book.
The astonishing thing is she would
remember the stories, the characters, the plot of this immense library of books
she’d read. I’d be reading a book and telling her about some aspect of the story
that intrigued me, and she would talk about it as though she also just read the
book yesterday. It often turned out that there were years between her reading
the book and our conversations.
My mother stowed away a long list of
books she meant to buy in the side pocket of her wallet. If she read a magazine article
that referred to a new author or book, she’d hurriedly take out the list and
scribble the name down and then continue reading. This list was the only haphazard
messy thing she owned. In all other aspects of her life she was ordered and
meticulous. The list was written in different colours of ink, sometimes the titles
or authors names were scribbled illegibly in the margins, others were crossed
through after she found them.
I wish I had saved one of those
lists. It makes me sad that I will never see one of them again.
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